Dr. Robin M. Boylorn is the inaugural Holle Endowed Chair of Communication Arts and Founding Director of the Holle Center for Communication Arts in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at The University of Alabama. She is also Professor of Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication in the Department of Communication Studies. She teaches and writes about issues of social identity and justice, focusing primarily on  characterizations of black women in the US American South. Her interdisciplinary interests and public intellectual work lies at the intersection of communication, critical/cultural studies, creativity and possibility. 

​

As a critical autoethnographer and cultural critic she studies culture through the lens and context of lived experience.  Her current research focuses on the relationship between storytelling and identity politics.  She coined the terms "ratchet respectability," "blackgirl (one word/no space)" and "blackgirlism" to critically engage relational and representational theories of black womanhood.  She uses ratchet respectability to discuss the oxymoronic and problematic class characterizations of black women on reality TV, and theorizes  blackgirlism as a way of understanding the indivisiblility of race and gender in the marginalized lives and experiences of black women and/as girls.

​​

As a scholar/activist, methodologist, speaker, and thinker she is committed to a life and work (life's work) that is rooted in love and intentionality, prioritizes social justice, models self-care and accountability, and makes home with honesty and humility.

​

She describes herself poetically, as follows:

​

<self-portrait> by R. Boylorn

​

crunk, creative, courageous, generous, ambitious

a poet, a professor, a visionary, a realist

a sports fan(atic) who is sometimes superstitious

spiritual (but not religious)

a storyteller, a wordsmith, a fantasist, a floacist

an Alice Walker womanist (or black feminist)

a cultural critic, a christian, a co-conspirator, a contradiction

a fashionista, a loner, a meridional misfit and magician

a writer, a hustler, a survivor, a keeper

a fully recovered former people-pleaser

charming, discerning, quick-witted and a reticent dreamer

a North Carolinian living in Alabama by way of Florida

who embodies the proverb "still waters run deep"

and loves herself fiercely

if only skin-deep

​

​She is also: loyal, liberal, honest, human, ethical, focused, independent, sentimental, a Virgo (self-explanatory), a dog lover & "sensitive about her shit." (Badu)

​​

​